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The meat mallet banged to the wooden counter top. "This meeting will now come to order," Bard said. "Maylene. What do you have to report?"
Maylene sat up straighter and adjusted her glasses, her dress, then her glasses again. "He was making the master tea this morning--"
"Oh, never mind that," Finny said. "He makes the master tea every morning."
"Wait your turn." Bard pointed the mallet at him, cigarette bobbing. Finny wriggled on his stool -- Tanaka had claimed the only proper chair in the kitchen -- and pressed his lips tightly together.
"He was making tea," Maylene said again, more loudly, "and he put an extra tart on the master's--"
"I saw his ankles!" Finny burst out.
"What?"
"You did not!"
"Oh my," said Tanaka.
"I did, I did." Finny jumped up, and Bard didn't shush him. "I was watering the garden, and I tripped and the bucket of water went flying over the hedge--"
"Finny!" Maylene shrieked. "You got Sebastian wet?"
"No! No, just a little bit. His trouser cuffs mostly, and I think a bit of his shoe. By the time I got over there he had..." Finny stopped and took a deep breath. "He had tugged up his trouser leg, just a little, and was wringing the water out, and there they were."
"What were they like?" Maylene asked, breathless.
"They were..." Finny swallowed. "They were the most beautiful ankles anyone could ever have."
"Huh," Bard said, and took a drag from his cigarette. Maylene elbowed him until he passed it to her. "Can't say that I'm surprised. About the ankles I mean. It'd be strange if his ankles weren't perfect, you know?"
They all nodded, and Tanaka took a mournful sip of his tea. Silence reigned over the kitchen for a long moment, challenged only by the distant sound of Pluto barking at frogs by the pond.
Bard was the first to stir. "Maylene, what happened with the tea?"
"Nothing." Maylene sighed. "Only the extra tart. No ankles at all, not even a wrist. He smiled a bit though. You know the smile?"
"The tea-making smile," Finny said, nodding. "I like that one, it never has any teeth." The four of them shuddered in unison. The teeth were... not good.
"Well, I've got nothing," Bard said, "except that he ruined my crème brûlée by not burning it enough. He almost touched me though, taking away my flamethrower. Seriously, I was less than two inches from glove-to-skin contact."
Finny made a polite noise of amazement.
"Oh, shut up. Ankles and a smile. Is that all we have?" Bard looked at each of them, then a scowl dropped over his face and he slammed the mallet against the counter again. "This is unacceptable. We serve the Phantomhive household too. We deserve better than ankles and a smile from him. We deserve glove-to-skin contact! We deserve a laugh!"
Maylene snorted. "And I suppose you're going to make him laugh, are you?"
Bard tossed down his cigarette, good as a glove. "I could."
"Could not."
"So."
"Not."
Finny looked between them, breath a tiny frantic bird in his throat. Sebastian laughing was an impossible, unattainable vision, the moon in still water at night. But to see that, to hear it...
In the midst of the showdown between cook and maid, there was a gentle clack as Tanaka set down his empty teacup, followed by a clink as he tossed a half-crown into it.
"Oh-ho-ho," he said, and smiled.
"Oh, now it's on," Maylene said, and shoved up her glasses and reached for her coinpurse.
Bard, unsurprisingly, made the first move. Finny had been in the gardens when it happened but by Maylene's (rather biased) retelling, it had involved food and fire and some sort of juggling act, and had ended with Sebastian putting out the kitchen for the second time in a week. Sebastian had not, Maylene noted a tad smugly, laughed, but he had spoken at length to Bard. Through his teeth.
The next attempt came from Tanaka. It involved a silent mime show during dinner, which Finny privately admitted was quite funny. Even Ciel raised an eyebrow and almost smiled at the antics. Sebastian, however, had just liberated the soup tureen from Tanaka's head and reminded him to take the little white tablets with his breakfast.
Maylene, from what Finny could see, was his only true rival for the pot that had steadily grown as it sat, unwon, on a high shelf in the kitchen. It was now almost a week's wages for all four of them, and Finny had his eye on a new variety of camellias available by mail order in the London Horticultural Review.
The trouble with Maylene was that she was a natural at comedy. At least she made Finny laugh all the time, whereas when he tried to tell a joke he grew tongue tied and got ahead of himself and spoiled the punchline. All Maylene had to do was fall off a chair at the wrong moment and the pot -- and more importantly, Sebastian's laugh -- was hers.
Maylene, however, approached the challenge in an entirely different manner. Finny might have told her that Sebastian would never find practical jokes amusing, primarily because he would never, ever fall for them. There ensued a week of short-sheeted beds that mysteriously unshortened themselves before bedtime and salt swapped for sugar that was somehow swapped back again and shoe polish on door handles that wound up back on shoes, until finally the master himself pulled Maylene aside and told her to kindly stop making his butler twitchy and growly because it only made Sebastian give more history lessons and Ciel hated history lessons.
Maylene's yellow card from the referee left the field wide open for Finny. He could already smell his new camellias; all he had to do was perfect his delivery. To that end he practiced three times a day in the mirror, until he could say his lines without the slightest fumble.
"'Well,' announced Mr. Perkabie to his wife, 'John and Mary have taken the first step toward divorce. They have got married.'"
Bard was still hiding from Sebastian and his teeth, and the little white pills made Tanaka too sleepy to be funny, but Finny knew Maylene would recover quickly. He had to strike first.
He chose a day when the master had music lessons, because Sebastian really liked wearing the glasses and Finny needed all the help he could get. He stood outside the door to the music room, muttering to himself, "So Smith asks, 'Were you ever in a railway disaster?' to which Brown replies, 'Yes, I once kissed the wrong girl in a tunnel.'" He took a deep breath, and eased the door open.
The lesson was over, and Sebastian was setting the master's violin back into its case. Finny slipped in unnoticed, and wiped his palms on his trousers and wondered if he ought to start with the one about the wooden teeth instead, and maybe this wasn't a good time because Ciel had that especially blank face on, the one that meant he was annoyed, and Sebastian was looking at the master like he liked it, but his ankles had been so very pretty and--
The master said something, too low for Finny to hear, but it was short and cool and just so slightly edged with the vibrant rage Ciel wore like a waistcoat on the days when he thought of his parents.
And Sebastian laughed.
A low rich chuckle, dark like scorched earth, like dead soil that would never grow a seed again, and thick like week-old blood from a skinned hare, curdled and rotten. Finny's breath caught and his blood ran to ice. At the same moment his skin flushed and his trousers grew tight and he wanted nothing more than to see Sebastian's ankles again, to touch them, taste them, and he thought he would die on the spot.
"What an amusing thought, young master," Sebastian said, and the laugh was still in his voice, hovering, a carrion-eating crow, and Finny broke and bolted.
He ran all the way to the back of the house, shaking and terrified and desperately wanting, and skittered into the kitchen in a numb daze. He fell against the door.
"The laugh," he said in a voice he'd never heard before, and Maylene dropped a dish and Bard dropped his cigarette and a pot fell and the wind slammed a door shut and Tanaka burned his hand on the stove. "It's so much worse than that smile. I never want to hear it again."
He was afraid he would dream of it for the rest of his life.
In the morning, when Ciel went to his office to begin his correspondence, he found on his desk a teacup containing twelve shillings, four pence and a halfpenny.
"Sebastian," Ciel said, half command, half accusation.
His butler smiled. "Buy yourself something nice with it." And then, close to his ear, warm and sweet and satisfying as murder: "You've earned it."